What Is The Stance Of Mainstream Institutions Regarding Diet with Brenda Davis R.D.

and one of the reasons I want to I wanted to show you this slide is simply because I want you to be aware of the stance of mainstream organizations like the Institute of Medicine the American Heart Association they know this is the information they’re providing people with for some reason people still aren’t quite getting it the World Heart Federation says a person eating a low a diet low in saturated fats with plenty of fruits and vegetables has a 73 percent risk reduction for new major cardiac events compared to someone eating a western-style diet so what about rates in vegetarian and vegan populations well epic Oxford forty five five thousand participants followed for twelve years found that vegetarians were less likely to develop heart disease than caught health-conscious meat or fish eaters this was really interesting they actually had were thirty two percent less likely when and this was vegetarians plus vegans lumped into one when all the variables were adjusted for except BMI which is body fatness and then twenty-eight percent less likely when they also factored in body fatness so how overweight somebody was now this fish eater thing I thought this was a strangest finding because normally fish and most of the epidemiological studies have found to be somewhat cardioprotective relative to meat so when fish eaters are compared to meat eaters they tend to do better so I actually this was um I I called one of the lead researchers on this on this study and I said what the heck how come the fish eaters didn’t do any better than the meat eaters and he said I don’t know and I said could it be because in the UK you tend to dip your fish in fat before you eat it as in fish and chips he said yeah maybe that’s it

so it’s a possibility the Adventist Health Study again over 73,000 participants and with men the vegans had 42 percent less cardiovascular disease and 55 percent less ischemic heart disease lacto-ovo vegetarians were 23% less cardiovascular disease 24% less ischemic heart disease and the the numbers that are bolded are significant the ones that aren’t bolded are non significant pesco vegetarians had 34 percent less cardiovascular disease and 23 percent less ischemic heart disease in the women there were no significant differences among the different dietary groups except the pesco the fish eating women had a 49 percent lower risk of ischemic heart disease and again I phone dr. Ehrlich who was the author on this and I said what’s up why are the women not doing as well as the men it doesn’t make sense and I he said I don’t know and I said could it be possible just what I told you before that the women have smaller differences the meat-eating Adventist versus the vegetarian Adventists than the men and he said that really is a possibility so but they’re not we really don’t know for sure

so why do vegetarians and vegans tend to do better where heart disease is concerned well they have more favorable risk factors so when we look at major modifiable risk factors like overweight and obesity elevated total and LDL cholesterol elevated triglycerides and high blood pressure vegetarians and vegans out a group are at lower risk for all of these things when we look at emerging risk factors like oxidized cholesterol inflammation poor antioxidant status greater IMT you know elevated TMAO I’m going to talk about all of these things but but again vegetarians are have a benefit for all of those emerging risk factors

so let’s first talk a little bit about the major modifiable risk factors well here we’ve got epic Oxford if you look at overweight and obesity the lowest BMI is vegans you can see then lacto-ovo vit ovo vegetarian about the same as fish eaters and both less than meat eaters but what’s really interesting here is if you look at the BM eyes they’re all within the healthy BMI zone even the meat eaters this is a European study but the vegans have the healthiest BM eyes

this is Adventist Health Study – here’s the vegans lacto-ovo pesco semi and non-vegetarian you can see the you know numbers the BMI is going up and a healthy BMI is is between eighteen point five and twenty four point nine right and so here within the United States the Adventists house study the only group that was in a healthy weight zone were the vegans everybody else was above the healthy weight numbers

elevated blood lipids again as you go from vegan to lacto-ovo to non-vegetarian blood cholesterol go up LDLs go up HDLs are not much different there are a little lower in the vegans but not a lot triglycerides are lowest in vegans are actually highest in the lacto-ovo vegetarians and this is based on about 20 studies and somewhere in between in non vegetarians and that would you know triglycerides tend to go up as your intake of carbohydrates especially refined carbohydrates goes up so these people may have been eating too many refined carbohydrates

what about hypertension’s epic oxford shows lowest rates of hypertension among vegans like five point eight percent among men seven point seven percent among women and then going up and and fifteen percent among meat-eating men and twelve percent among meat-eating women so really a very significant difference in the Adventist Health Study to hypertension was 75 percent lower among vegans and it was fifty five percent lower among lacto-ovo vegetarians than it was among health-conscious meat-eaters so very very significant finding

so what about the emerging risk factors inflammation chronic low grade LeMay ssin increases metabolic abnormalities that are associated with cardiovascular disease and it makes arterial plaque vulnerable to rupture and thrombosis so this is a serious issue in risk so vegetarians what we know is four out of five studies assessing CRP levels in CRP is your indicator for inflammation it’s a blood test you can do to test your levels of inflammation vegetarians showed significantly lower levels of inflammation compared to omnivores and there was only one study on vegans and this was actually on raw vegans but the vegans had a CRP of 0.57 compared to endurance athletes 0.75 compared to people eating a Western diet 2.6 1 and a really healthy level is one or less so the vegans had the best level by far

what about oxidative stress well hyperlipidemia which is you know high cholesterol and high triglycerides causes oxidative stress and reduces our antioxidant defense system elevating levels of the sort of damaged fats in our bodies high intakes of dietary heme iron that’s blood iron the iron from meat and fish and not all of the iron in meat and fish is heme iron but a you know probably 40 or 50 percent of it is and from saturated animal fats are associated with increased oxidative stress and dietary cholesterol actually increases the susceptibility of LDL to oxidation by nearly 40 percent limited evidence suggests that vegan and vegetarian diets decrease the oxidation of lipids probably owing to the high antioxidant and low well know heme iron content in these diets and also vegetarians tend to have more favourable antioxidant status and and this is important to know food sources of antioxidants are protective supplement sources of antioxidants have not been shown to be protective okay so very important to know that

a carotid IMT and here we’re looking at this kind of layer where plaque develops within the blood vessels sort of the outer layer and when you have a high IMT or carotid IMT it increases dramatically your risk of heart disease and diets high in meat and low in fiber can increase this carotid IMT well vegan diets and near vegan diets tend to reduce it

so what about this high TMAO which vegetarians tend to be protected against well high TMAO accelerates atherosclerosis especially in heart failure patients the highest TMAO levels increase their risk of dying by three point four times so this is really significant omnivores who regularly consume red meat our ideal hosts for the bacteria in the intestines that produce TMA and vegans have none of the TMA producing bacteria zero so even exactly even if you take carnitine from a supplement you won’t produce TMA because you don’t have the bacteria to make it so we don’t have those bad bacteria and then the TMA gets sent to the liver and it gets converted to TMAO which causes the damage and in fact it can also be produced from choline which is very high in eggs as well but we get ho lean from some plant foods but again we don’t have the bacteria to produce the TMA from it so this is good news